Home Country: Let not the world forget

In mid-April, 1945, elements of the advancing U.S. 8th Army were on the outskirts of the ancient city of Weimar in eastern Germany. It was during these, the closing days of World War II, at a place known as Ettersberg Hill that they broke through the gates and barbed wire of a prison facility known as Buchenwald.

What the battle-hardened American soldiers found there would not only live forever in their memories, but would make of the name itself an epithet on the lips of a generation of world citizens. In its eight-year history as a prisoner work camp, the crematorium and surrounding forests of Buchenwald had witnessed the disposal of the bodies of at least 56,000 of its quarter-million inmates. 28,000 emaciated survivors still clung to life on that April day of liberation, many of them survivors of even worse facilities in Poland and eastern Europe, “evacuated” on death marches which took their own terrible toll during those final months of war.

As terrible as were the grizzly statistics carefully recorded in the German captors’ daily journals at Buchenwald, they paled in comparison with the lists just as meticulously maintained by other camps – especially those designated under the infamous Operation Reinhard Plan master-minded by Heinrich Himmler. Such facilities as those at Sobibor, Belzac, Treblinka and Chelmno in Poland were engineered and administered strictly as “extermination camps”. At these places there was no mere confinement; no convenient slave labor projects or temporary detention. They were Death Camps pure and simple. The people sent to these murder mills by the trainload held only one-way tickets, and their mass and efficient execution would take place usually within hours of their arrival. Of the two-plus million killed at these four locations alone, records show that one third were children !

The first experiments with mass extermination took place at Chelmno, where there were no nearby populations to compromise the secrecy which blanketed the pilot project. Death was administered in three military vans, into which fumes could be diverted from the idling engines. Surrounding forests accommodated the crude mass burial process which followed. Then at Belzac where the experimentations continued, diesel-powered gas chambers and open-pit burials proved too inefficient and time-consuming, as was also the case at remote Sobibor, in a tiny, virtually-unpopulated corner of the Polish countryside.

It was finally at Treblinka that the practitioners of racial genocide hit their stride, applying the lessons learned and the technology of death perfected along the way. Here they were able to destroy the lives and remains of more than one million victims in one twelve month period. Secretly and efficiently. With the approval stamp of Adolph Hitler, and the personal oversight of Himmler and his top SS lieutenants, the Reinhard plan had as its goal the extermination of Europe’s Jews. Of course it was also “open season” on Gypsies, homosexuals, and other eastern Europeans who fell under the designation of sub-humans. What is often overlooked by casual historians of the era is that believing Christians were also high on Hitler’s hit list - right behind racial and religious Jews. Many educated “intellectuals” were also seen as potential enemies of the state, disappearing into the maize of camps and work depots as “undesireables”.

What has to remain as one of the most haunting questions left behind by the era of the Holocaust is this: How is it possible that politically-sanctioned mass murder on such a gigantic scale could have taken place in the midst of one of the most educated and enlightened societies in world history ?

As one more Holocaust Remembrance Week passes almost unnoticed each year, I find myself once again thinking back on a time and place, and the fragile nature of personal freedom and liberty.

In the top drawer of my writing desk is a 3x5 index card I have kept within my reach for many years. On it is hand-written sixteen words: